Situated at the meeting point of three continental plates, Japan is more prone to earthquakes than any other country in the world, and you might be forgiven for thinking that it is a dangerous place to live. In reality – and like our perception of the threat from terrorism or violent crime, for example – the chances of falling victim to an earthquake are incredibly small, and you are much more likely to die in a car crash, of a heart attack, or from sticking a knife in a toaster. As it happens, living through a small-scale quake can be more fun than frightening, and whether you are lying in bed, eating out or at work, the experience is usually quite predictable. First the room begins to shake, although gently at first, so that it can be a few seconds before people catch on to what is happening; then the shaking intensifies, to the point where crockery and glassware rattle and furniture sways back and forth; and finally, after somewhere between ten and thirty seconds, the movement subsides and everything returns to normal. The severity of a quake can be judged by the direction of its tremors: if they are from side to side there is nothing to worry about, but if they are up and down it is time to evacuate the building as soon as possible, or, if you happen to be any higher than the first or second floor, to hide under the nearest table. Rather than panic and run screaming through the streets, the sensible expat should try to appear as blasé as possible, and many Japanese will hardly react at all, except to briefly look up from what they are doing when the quake becomes perceptible, just to make sure that its tremors are not of the up-and-down variety. In a year and a half in Japan, I had only experienced side-to-side quakes, and the nearest thing to structural damage I had seen was at a supermarket, where a few bars of soap and bottles of shampoo had toppled from their shelves and fallen to the floor. It seems to me that you are less likely to realise an earthquake is taking place when you are moving around outside, and on that occasion I had been riding the Mariposa, with no physical sensation that a quake had hit, just the unnerving sound of rattling windows all around me.

Of course, the reason Japan has suffered so few earthquake-related fatalities – in modern times, at least – is because it is a First World nation, and can afford to make its architecture, roads, railways and coastline comparatively earthquake- and tsunami-proof: ‘comparatively’ being the operative word, as during the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, more than two hundred thousand buildings collapsed, together with a large section of the Hanshin Expressway and much of Kobé’s port. Over six thousand lives were lost, making it Japan’s worst natural disaster since the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo and its surroundings in 1923 [editor’s note: that is of course until the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, which took place after I wrote this account of my tour], although when the earthquake struck, through some quirk of tectonics its devastation was confined to the lower, coastal area of the city, leaving the hilly suburbs above largely untouched.

It wasn’t until I joined the rush hour traffic that I realised just how far above sea level I had ended up the previous evening, and how clear a division there exists between the area around my emergency campsite and the city centre below. Alongside a modest memorial to the earthquake stands Kobé Port Tower, from the observation deck of which I emailed Mr Sturdy Level to let him know that I would soon be arriving in Osaka. We arranged to meet for a drink later on, which meant a short ride along the coast, and practically a day off compared to yesterday’s odyssey. This gave me time to stop at an internet café, where despite explaining how unlikely it was that I would ever return, the assistant insisted that I fill out the paperwork and become a member. All I really wanted to do was to check on England’s progress in the Third Test, but due to the time difference, the first over of the final day was still several hours away, so I looked at my CDs of photographs instead. The shot of the Genbaku Dome in Hiroshima had come out particularly well, and I tinkered with the PC’s control panel so that it appeared on the desktop, before changing my mind at the last minute, in case anyone thought I was trying to offend them with some kind of subversive statement about the war.

Kobé merged seamlessly with Osaka, and despite its proximity, I hardly caught a glimpse of the sea, which was obscured for the most part by expressways, high rises and reclaimed land. Back in the days when Japan had more money than it knew what to do with, land reclamation was all the rage, and several major airports, including Haneda in Tokyo Bay, Chubu near Nagoya and Kansai International in Osaka, are built on man-made islands. Like many public works projects these were enormously expensive, leaving local authorities heavily in debt, and as a consequence, Osaka has been practically bankrupt since the mid-nineties (or so I've been told, anyway). Still, the city felt a lot less claustrophobic than Tokyo, partly because the population is smaller, but also because the surrounding mountains are readily visible from its wide streets.

After lunch I phoned both of Osaka’s youth hostels, and while the first had a ten p.m. curfew, the second was in Shin-Osaka (shin meaning ‘new’, and Shin-Osaka being the city’s Shinkansen stop), which was just one subway stop from Mr Sturdy Level’s workplace, and did not shut its doors until eleven. It was on the upper floors of a newly built office block, with views over the city, carpeted corridors, discreetly modern fixtures and fittings, and all the mod cons a weary traveller could possibly need. With several hours to waste before I was due to meet Mr Sturdy Level, I put on a load of washing and pampered myself with a bath and a lie down, and soon got talking to another Englishman in the opposite bunk. Apart from nursing a hangover, he was touring Asia to take part in computer game contests, and made a living writing games reviews for magazines. He had been thinking about moving to Japan, he said, so I extolled the virtues of working as an ALT, and in return received some tips on how to keep using a Japan Rail Pass even after it has expired – apparently, the trick is to alight at smaller stations where the staff are less rigorous about checking tickets.

On my way to the subway later on, I came across an extraordinary scene outside a nearby conbini. A battered old car, which had seen at least a couple of prangs in its time and possibly even a fire or two, was parked diagonally across the pavement, with its back wheels still on the road and its radio blaring. It was overflowing with rubbish, as cups, crisp packets, fast food containers, newspapers, magazines, old clothes and goodness knows what else tumbled out of the doors and windows to be blown about in the breeze. Presiding over the devastation was a man in his thirties or forties, who wore aviator shades and talked loudly into his keitai, although something told me this was a one-way conversation. The most bizarre aspect of the whole thing was that he also happened to be wearing - along with a grubby t-shirt and an old pair of trainers - a pink frilly tutu.

Once I had arrived at the tongue-twister-in-the-making that is Nishi-Nakajima-Minami-Kata station, Mr Sturdy Level took me to a large and almost deserted izakaya, most of whose regular customers were out of town for Obon. He had invited three of his work colleagues, namely Mr Traverse Area, a shy, bespectacled man wearing clothes that appeared to have been chosen by his mother; Sunny Boy, a younger and more snappily dressed local with bleached hair; and Mr Sydney, an Australian who had studied Japanese at university, thus enabling him to bypass English teaching when it came to obtaining a work visa. The waiters and waitresses plied us with beer after beer and dish after dish, and I felt more confident than ever about my ability to join in with a conversation between Japanese men (not to mention Japanese-speaking gaijin). There were occasions when Mr Sydney had to translate, after Sunny Boy – so nicknamed because of his cheerful disposition – rattled off a question at top speed, or when Mr Sturdy Level had to re-pronounce in Kansai-ben (関西弁 / Kansai dialect) if Sunny Boy was baffled by my still overly polite Japanese. But I got the general gist of things, and hopefully didn’t come across like the swotty schoolboy a friend in Tokyo had once accused me of resembling. When Mr Sturdy Level asked if I had lost my temper at any point during the summer, I even managed to make everyone laugh by relating the story of the spotty receptionist at Shiawasé-no-Mura, and after Sunny Boy became the first person to notice it in four weeks, to coherently explain the significance of my wrist-watch.

For years after my father’s death in 1990, I had been in possession of his old Rolex, which was very much the worse for wear and had long since stopped working. When I eventually got round to having it repaired, I was told by the assistant at Watches of Switzerland in Bond Street that it was worth a tidy four-figure sum, and as such, it probably wasn’t the kind of thing I should be wearing on a cycling holiday. But wear it I did, as it reminded me of the interests my father and I had shared – he too was a keen cyclist and Tour de France enthusiast – and of how he would have enjoyed this kind of adventure himself. The irony was that as a watch, the Rolex was next to useless, as it slowed by several minutes a week, the hands were hard to see, and the date needed adjusting five months out of every twelve in order to compensate for the fact that it counted round to thirty-one. Its nearly new face was already scratched from an altercation with a crash barrier one morning on my way to work, and its condition had deteriorated even further on my journey through Japan. But as well as being a family heirloom, the Rolex was my one concession to superstition - my lucky charm for the trip - and more than that, it reminded me to be careful when it came to cultivating my tan, as my father had passed away because of skin cancer. Six weeks in the high heat of a Japanese summer gave me a pretty good chance of ending up in the same predicament, and regardless of aching knees or malfunctioning fingers – regardless even of the possibility of being knocked over by a passing car – my real nemesis was the sunshine itself, and the bottle of factor fifteen in my panniers more important than any first aid kit.

‘So, Muzuhashi,’ said Mr Sturdy Level as the evening drew to a close, ‘what will you do now? Are you going to cycle all the way back to Ibaraki?’‘I’m not sure. It’ll certainly be tough.’‘But how will you get home if you don’t?’‘I suppose I’ll just tour around Kansai for a week, visit my friend Mr Swansea in Nagoya, and catch the same ferry you came in on, from Osaka back to Tokyo.’

But even as I said this, I didn’t believe it. Mr Sturdy Level hadn’t exactly laid down the gauntlet – he wasn’t the macho, competitive type, after all – but the subtext of his question was this: ‘Are you man enough to cycle all the way, to do what you set out to do, to ACHIEVE YOUR GOAL?’ And in this sense, he had me sussed, because looking back on it, I am not sure if there was ever a doubt in my mind that I would do just that. As we said goodbye at the station, I told Mr Sturdy Level and his colleagues that I might see them again in a week or two, although I already knew that to allow this to happen would represent, in terms of my rather fragile ego, a humiliating failure.

Mr Kanagawa woke me at five a.m. to say that he was off to find a café and write his diary, and such an early start could either have been force of habit, or because he found it difficult to sleep in what for him were unusual conditions (in a subsequent email, he described the Somen Campsite as ‘probably the scariest place’ he had stayed during his entire two months away). The weather may have been dry overnight, but everything else at the campsite was still soaking wet, and when I got up about three hours later, another couple of cyclists were packing away damp tents on the far side of our mud bank. One was Japanese, and looked like a still from a cycling magazine, with every part of his body adorned in a specialist item of sportswear, from his bandana to his bumbag. A former soldier, he had downgraded to pedal power when his motorcycle broke down, and his travelling companion was an Englishman. While each had learnt a few words of the other’s language, it was the Brit who did most of the talking, and explained how he had quit his banking job in order to spend some of the money he earned rather than just save it. Up until then, his longest tour had been for a week or two around Europe, but now, after a year and a half cycling through Australia, New Zealand, China and Thailand, his milometer (or should that be 'kilometometer'?) was about to tick over the sixteen-thousand-kilometre mark. His bicycle was an old-style racer with drop handlebars and three large water bottles attached to the frame, which had doubtless come in handy in places like the Australian outback, where the distance between convenience stores was much greater, and the consequences more serious should you happen to run out of liquids. With Japan as the final country on his itinerary, he was due to fly home in just a fortnight’s time, and as the two of them cycled off for a bi-lingual breakfast, I wondered how he would cope with sitting behind a desk again after so much freedom.

As promised, Mr Kanagawa was waiting for me outside Himeji Castle, which has dominated the city for the best part of seven hundred years, and while I could bore you with some history at this point, I am sure that you would be far more interested to know about its appearance in the Bond film You Only Live Twice. If you have read Ian Fleming’s book of the same name, you will recall that its finale takes place in Blofeld’s castle, where visitors go to partake in a form of assisted suicide, and for which Himeji would have made the perfect location. In the more high-tech film adaptation, however, Blofeld attempts to trigger World War Three by launching a spacecraft from his secret base in a hollowed-out volcano, and Himeji is relegated to a brief cameo as a ninja training camp. Still, if Sean Connery had once set foot in the grounds, I was more than willing to take some time out of my schedule for a closer look.

The foundations of the castle are constructed like a large-scale dry stone wall, with irregular blocks ingeniously slotted together to form a uniformly sloping surface, and from this wide base, each successive layer is smaller than the last, so that its structure is more pyramid-like than box-shaped. Both the outbuildings and the castle’s interior are a maze of dead ends, false walls, rooms within rooms and hidden doors, so that a defending army can retreat inwards and upwards, while still having access to supplies and ammunition. The higher you climb within, the lower the ceilings, the narrower the corridors and the smaller the windows, until on the top floor there is a solitary room just a few metres square, in which the remaining members of a shogun’s family may have continued to fend off an attack. The only problem with this strategy is that whoever does the attacking can simply burn the place down, although contrary to the Trigger’s Broom Principle of Japanese Monuments (see Day 15), this has not happened to Himeji Castle for at least four hundred years. Indeed, I have never seen a building that felt so indestructible or so impenetrable, its dark, hardwood framework as solid as its thick stone walls, and its staircases – which hadn’t exactly been easy to negotiate on the lower floors – little more than ladders by the time Mr Kanagawa and I had reached the top.

As we ate lunch together near Himeji Station, I asked Mr Kanagawa about his plans for the future.‘I want to go and live abroad,' he said.‘Whereabouts?’‘America, if I can.’‘So you want to study English?’‘Yes.’ Mr Kanagawa looked a little sheepish at this point. ‘I suppose you’ve noticed that since we met, I’ve only been speaking Japanese.’‘Well, yes. I didn’t think you wanted to speak English. You should have said something.’‘My English isn’t very good, though. One day I want to improve it, but for now…’

At a crossroads not far from the castle we said our farewells, Mr Kanagawa heading north towards Maizuru and me east towards Kobé, and if I hadn’t prompted him into shaking hands, he would have ridden off with just a wave. He was a shy and thoroughly modest man, and seemed unaware of – or at least unaffected by – everything he had going for him, and of just how courageous he was to travel around the country for two months, on his own and on a shoestring.

The road east took me through rolling hills and past rice fields and reservoirs, and along the way I found my first Cup Noodle vending machine, isolated and forlorn but still functioning, in a deserted layby next to some farm buildings.

Situated on the outskirts of Kobé, the only campsite within easy reach called itself Shiawasé-No-Mura, and while it was surely tempting fate to stay in a place whose name translates as ‘Village of Happiness’, I chose to ignore this, and stopped at a 7-11 to ask for directions.

‘Hmm. Shiawasé-no-Mura. I wonder…’ The assistant stroked his chin and studied the Mapple.‘The thing is, it looks like it’s just over there,’ I said, pointing towards some residential side streets, beyond which the campsite was only a couple of kilometres away as the crow flies.‘I know it looks as if it’s close by,’ said the assistant, ‘but it’s actually quite difficult to get to. You’re on a bicycle?’‘Yes.’‘I think it’ll be easier to go this way.’ He ran his finger along the map in the direction from which I had just arrived, and to a road that headed northeast, skirting a large green area on the map, in the middle of which was Shiawasé-no-Mura. It seemed like a long way round, but based on the fact that he hadn’t turned the Mapple upside down when I handed it to him, I decided to trust his judgement, even as a few spots of rain began to fall.

Compared to the road from Himeji there were suddenly a lot more hills, and it took at least an hour in the countryside before I made it back to civilisation. Even then, whenever I stopped to ask a passerby, Shiawasé-no-Mura was always just that little bit further down the road, round one more bend or over one more bridge. Finally, at about six in the evening and still short of my goal, the heavens opened, and I sought shelter in a shop doorway.

While it may be possible in the Japanese multi-tasking style to hold an umbrella while riding a bicycle (it is also possible to buy special umbrella clamps, which attach to the handlebars and do the job for you, as well as tubular plastic holders for the front forks, in which to stash an umbrella when you are not using it), I certainly wasn’t going to try. Had I been walking, however, I may well have used one, because here they can be genuinely useful. In the UK you carry an umbrella with you all day, open it when the rain begins to fall, see it blown inside out within seconds, and then inadvertently leave it on the bus, never to be seen again. In Japan, on the other hand, you can buy a brolly for a hundred yen (about fifty pence), which is a price much closer to its material value, and entails no real disappointment should it be mislaid. Secondly, the weather is more predictable: in the rainy season you can pretty much guarantee to get soaked at least once a day, whereas in winter, you might go for months at a time without so much as a light shower, and there is rarely the need to carry a brolly ‘just in case’. Thirdly, when it does rain, it does so copiously, prodigiously, and straight down. It can rain for twenty-four, even forty-eight hours non-stop, and so hard that the finest Gore-Tex will keep you dry for approximately five minutes – not to mention uncomfortably hot. If you are unlucky enough to be out in a typhoon, your umbrella will of course be ripped to pieces, but you will also be in danger of being hit by flying roof tiles, scaffolding, street signs or fellow pedestrians, so you really should have stayed indoors in the first place. At all other times, there is rain but no wind, and your umbrella does the job for which it was designed. What this also means is that umbrellas are not considered uncool, and even the toughest or trendiest high school kid is content to be seen beneath a dainty little see-through number with a white plastic handle. My waterproofs were no match for this downpour, and even a hundred-yen umbrella would be too much of a luxury for my baggage allowance, so I just sat and watched. I watched the rain smack against the pavement and roll down the gutter, I watched the lightning flash over Kobé, I watched a queue form at the Chinese restaurant over the road, and out of curiosity, I watched the weather forecast on my keitai, which said ‘Kobé – 6pm – 20% chance of rain’.

It was dark by the time I coasted into Shiawasé-no-Mura, a utopian idyll and the complete opposite of the modest little places I was used to. Secreted away in a bowl-like valley and oblivious to the homes and shops nearby, its car parks, sports facilities and hotels were surrounded by a faux countryside of flowerbeds, fields and trees. I parked the Mariposa outside the largest and most ostentatious building, and couldn’t help but feel pessimistic as I crossed an expanse of marble flooring between the revolving doors and the reception desk.

‘Would it be possible to stay on the campsite this evening?’The receptionist was short and plump in his bellboy’s jacket, with a flaming red spot on his top lip, from which I attempted to avert my gaze as he replied.‘If you would like to stay at the campsite, you should ring this number and book in advance.’ He slid an information leaflet towards me across the counter.‘Well, I’m here now, so can I stay at the campsite tonight?’‘Like I said, if you would like to stay at the campsite, you should ring this number,’ he waved his hand over the leaflet to indicate the phone number once more, ‘in advance.’‘Of course. I understand. What about tonight, though? Are you fully booked?’‘How did you travel here today?’‘By bicycle. It’s, er, outside.’‘I’m sorry sir. I’m afraid the campsite is fully booked.’I wondered why he hadn’t told me this in the first place, but tried to remain diplomatic. ‘You see, I’m in a bit of bother. As far as I can tell this is the only campsite in Kobé. Are you sure it wouldn’t be possible for me to stay? It’s only for one night and my tent’s very small, so I could…’‘I’m afraid this is an auto campsite. We don’t have any space for cyclists or motorcyclists.’ The receptionist’s spot seemed to glow even redder than before from the sheer satisfaction of having spoilt my evening.‘But there isn’t even a youth hostel in Kobé, so if I can’t stay here…’‘Sorry sir. As I explained, the campsite is fully booked.’

At this point, and just as I was beginning to contemplate physical violence, the receptionist had a change of heart. You wouldn’t have known it from his expression, which still oozed contempt, but some long-dormant part of him must have taken pity on me. He produced a map from beneath the counter, and proceeded to show me two (ahem) spots elsewhere in Kobé where it might be possible to camp, and which ought to have mains water, even if they didn’t have toilets or showers. There was no point in rushing, as it was already dark, and if the places to which he had directed me were only semi-legitimate, the later I arrived the better.‘Can I use the onsen before I go?’‘Certainly sir. Our onsen is open to members of the public.’ With the merest hint of a smile, he directed me to a nearby vending machine. ‘You can buy a ticket over there.’

Knowing what might lie ahead, I found it difficult to relax as I bathed, and the holiday camp atmosphere didn’t help, with screaming children chasing each other between the rock pools, waterfalls and indoor palm trees. Once I had left the 'village', the receptionist’s directions took me up a couple of steep climbs (Kobé was turning out to be a veritable San Francisco of the East) and along a deserted side road, beside which the pylons and transformers of an electricity substation hummed away in the darknesss. Unsure of quite what I was looking for, I contemplated diving into a hedgerow and lying down in the undergrowth, but presently, voices began to filter through the trees, and at the end of a muddy track I spied a group of children enjoying a barbecue.

‘Excuse me,' I said. 'I’ve been told I might be able to camp here.’A stern-looking middle-aged man came over and stood directly in front of me.‘No, you can’t stay here,' he said. 'As you can see, there is a scout camp this weekend. Nobody else is allowed to stay.’‘It’s just that I tried a campsite down the road and they wouldn’t let me in, so…’‘You can’t stay here. We have booked the site this weekend.’ The man, who clearly took me for some deranged child killer, guided me back towards the road. ‘I’m afraid you will have to find somewhere else.’But I wasn’t going to be turned away now, and stalled for time by examining the map and putting on my most convincing ‘lost puppy’ face, which it has to be said wasn’t too difficult under the circumstances.

‘What are you looking for?’ A prim girl in a baseball cap, t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms stood between the scouts and myself, as if to protect them should I pounce suddenly. I told her what had happened at Shiawasé-no-Mura and was greeted with the same negative response, although by this point, one or two of her friends had noticed my presence, and were taking an interest in our conversation. A lad with spiky hair and glasses chipped in.‘Where have you come from today?’ he said.‘Himeji.’‘Himeji? By bicycle?’‘Yes. It’s not so far really. Only about sixty kilometres.’‘Eeeeeeh?!’

The girl in the baseball cap appeared unmoved, but by now, several more people had introduced themselves. Like those I had met in Higashi-Hiroshima and Shodoshima, they were university students who had given up some of their holiday time to work with children. The spiky-haired lad began talking to the girl in hushed tones, and appeared to be negotiating on my behalf. After a couple of minutes, she relented.

‘Seeing as you appear to be in genuine need, I will check with my boss to see if you can stay.’ Bingo! My strategy had worked. ‘Mr Healthy Englightenment, can you look after this gentleman in the meantime?’‘OK.’ The spiky-haired lad turned to me and asked, ‘Have you eaten dinner yet?’ Bingo again! They were even going to feed me.‘Er, no, I haven’t,’ I replied, and with that, Mr Healthy Englightenment led me to the staff room and produced an array of snacks, sweets and fizzy drinks. Pretty soon, I had also been furnished with miso soup and nigiri, as the girl in the baseball cap reappeared.

‘I have telephoned the owner of the campsite, and he says that you can stay for one night, so long as you keep the place clean and tidy, and leave early tomorrow morning.’ Result! At last I had a place to stay. I bowed and thanked her in as polite a manner as possible, while cheering inwardly for having foiled her evil plan to cast me back into the wilds of suburban Kobé.

Once the scouts had been put to bed, we held an English conversation seminar around the staff room’s picnic table, with the students firing questions and me answering between mouthfuls of junk food. They took it in turns disappearing into the shower block, and when everyone was done, I was shown to a small car park next to the toilets to put up my tent.

‘We’ve been thinking,’ said Mr Healthy Englightenment, ‘before you go to bed, we’d like to do a performance for you.’‘What sort of performance?’‘It’s called towaaringu.’‘Towaaringu?’‘Yes, towaaringu.’ I had no idea what towaaringu was, but I wasn’t about to turn them down. ‘We’re performing for the children tomorrow. It isn’t quite perfect yet, but hopefully you’ll enjoy it.’

Four metal rods were produced, each with a T-shaped handle at one end and a tight ball of rags at the other. The rags were soaked in what appeared to be petrol or paraffin, lit, and either individually or in pairs, the students spun the now flaming torches around them in the manner of majorettes’ batons. My friend Miss Birmingham – she of the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Gucci sunglasses – practiced something called poi, which involved lengths of cord with rubber balls on the end and similar choreography, but towaaringu was altogether more impressive. The torches made a tremendous whooshing sound as they spun, their trails of light hanging in the air like an after-image, and each performance would gradually speed up, until with one final, blurring swoop, the flames were extinguished. I kept half an eye on the Snow Peak in case a torch flew from someone’s grasp and blazed a trail through the flysheet, but only one was dropped (by Mr Healthy Englightenment, who had already admitted to being tired, having spent the previous evening in a love hotel with his girlfriend), and that flew harmlessly away across the car park.

The finale was handed over to Mr Clever Fat Son, who had sat unobtrusively in the corner as we ate, only interjecting now and then to correct his friends’ English. Sure enough, he produced the best moves of all, and like so many Japanese was a man of hidden talents, who didn’t make a show of the fact that he had practiced something with such dedication as to become spectacularly good at it.

‘Twirling!’ I blurted out, as Mr Clever Fat Son’s performance came to an end, and Mr Healthy Englightenment looked confused.‘What?’‘Twirling – that’s what you meant by ‘towaaringu’. It is an English word after all.’Mr Healthy Englightenment apologised for their mispronunciation, and I said goodnight with the light still dancing across my eyes.

One of my ideas for a sightseeing stop-off on the return journey from Kyushu to Ibaraki had been Jigokudani in the Japan Alps, where Macaque monkeys take refuge from the snow in steaming pools of volcanic spring water, their exposed fur flecked with chunks of ice. It now seemed unlikely that I would make it that far north, but encountering monkeys in their natural habitat was the activity I had secretly looked forward to more than anything else on the trip, so I was positively thrilled to discover that Shodoshima had its own population of monkeys, even if they didn’t have a penchant for taking hot baths.

At the front gates of Choshikei-Osarunokuni-Shizendobutsuen (‘Choshikei Honourable Monkey World Nature Animal Park’ – yes, these were more than just monkeys, they were honourable monkeys), I was presented with a leaflet depicting the dos and don’ts of monkey-spotting etiquette, whose illustrated instructions went something like this:

What to beware of when observing monkeys:1) Do not go near the baby monkeys.2) Do not touch the monkeys.3) Do not look into the monkeys’ eyes.4) Do not show them sweets or fruit.5) Pay attention to your hand luggage. [In the cartoon for this one, a thuggish looking monkey is trying to grab a woman’s handbag. “Give us it!” he snaps, as she says, “Oh…Oh dear!” and a bead of sweat trickles down her cheek.]6) In particular, please leave plastic bags, paper bags and so on at the ticket office.Take care of the above when you enter the park and the honourable monkeys will be happy and give you a warm welcome.

The cartoon monkey in number three was fixing the gaze of a punter in a particularly intimidating manner, and made me feel as if I was about to enter a dodgy East End pub, although having joined the queue of visitors on a tree-lined pathway, there was no wildlife to be seen. Presently the pathway opened out to reveal an adventure playground of ropes, climbing frames and old car tyres, where lone monkeys sunned themselves or darted in and out of the bushes. Then, beside a long, wooden office building, suddenly there were monkeys everywhere, to the extent that you could hardly move without bumping into one.

Whether squatting on the ground or walking on all fours, they were no more than half a metre tall, with long, pink faces and yellowish eyes, and resembled photographs of their Macaque cousins in Jigokudani, only with less of the mousey, grey-brown fur. A small boy in a baseball cap threw handfuls of peanuts from a plastic bucket into the crowd, and was the centre of attention for a sea of monkey heads, which bobbed up and down like spectators at a rock concert trying to catch a glimpse of the lead singer.

Several more children were waiting their turn, and a sign behind the boy also listed the price of dried soya beans, so with no fence to keep the monkeys in, free food had to be one of the main reasons they stayed in the park. Not that there was anywhere else to go on Shodoshima, and while I had just missed a performance, they probably had a vested interest in the twice-daily ‘Monkey Show’ as well.

Unless we humans happened to be carrying a bucket of peanuts, the monkeys hardly paid us any attention, and simply got on with whatever it was they were doing in their knee-high world. Some were breastfeeding or carrying babies around on their backs, others were fighting over food or grooming each other, and it soon became possible to distinguish individual personalities: the scrawny outcast who keeps getting beaten up, the unruly youth messing around with his mates, or the grandmother offering to babysit for her daughter. Using a camera enabled me to look into their eyes without breaking the rules, and while it may sound like a cliché, there really did seem to be something profound going on. The monkeys could not have had any concept of what I was pointing at them, or of who these strange creatures in their midst really were, and yet they still possessed an air of self-consciousness, and I sensed a connection no less weighted with meaning than when you catch a stranger’s eye in the street: an exchange that somehow alludes to common understanding.

From the Honourable Monkey Park I could have continued directly to the port of Fukuda (which before you ask is pronounced ‘foo-koo-da’), but this would have taken me past a sign saying ‘3.5km at 18%’, and to the highest point on the island. I chose the easier option, and instead followed the coast road to Shodoshima’s northernmost point, which turned out to be a wasteland of white and reddish-brown rock, as if a godlike spoon had mistaken the hillside for a dessert and scooped its topping away. Quarries like these produce aggregates and building materials, and once exhausted are put to work as dumping grounds for industrial waste – sometimes legitimate and sometimes otherwise – that arrives from elsewhere around Kansai and the Seto-Naikai. Visible from the ferry to Himeji, many of Shodoshima’s smaller, satellite islands had succumbed to a similar fate, dug up and carried away by conveyor belts and cargo ships, and with not a tree left standing. As the ferry left the last of these behind, a rainstorm swept down in a shadowy blur between sky and sea, and I nodded off in my comfortable booth seat to thoughts of a big monkey family crowding around my feet, all hungry for peanuts and intent on catching my eye.

Although the worst of the rain had passed, the ground was still wet beneath the steel exit ramp at Himeji Port, and as I consulted my Mapple, a cyclist stopped beside me and asked if we could ride together into the city centre. Mr Kanagawa was tall and slim with fashionably bleached hair, little John Lennon spectacles, baggy clothes and black and white Converse All-Stars. A university student, he had two whole months at his disposal between summer and autumn terms, and planned on catching a ferry to Hokkaido later in the week, via the Japan Sea from a town called Maizuru. No matter how hard I tried, no matter the conditions, and despite basing my calculations on a mixture of mapwork and guesswork, I normally covered around sixty kilometres a day. Mr Kanagawa, on the other hand, claimed to be averaging more like a hundred, which was either because of his bicycle – a lightweight hybrid of mountain bike and racer that cost sixty thousand yen (about three hundred pounds) – or his routine. Mr Kanagawa had yet to pay for a single night’s accommodation, and often chose to camp in the grounds of elementary schools, which meant rising early – normally at five a.m. – so as to avoid staff or students taking part in summer holiday activities.

‘Have you ever been caught?’ I asked, as we rode through the suburbs beside a busy dual carriageway.‘A couple of times, yes.’‘And did you get into trouble?’‘Not at all, no. Once I’d explained what I was doing, they said there was no need to hurry so long as I left by eight or eight thirty, and I’m normally gone by six.’

Mr Kanagawa’s plan for tonight was to join the community of homeless people that lives on parkland surrounding Himeji Castle, but the place was still crowded with tourists when we arrived, and I couldn’t imagine it would be long before he was moved on by park keepers or the police.‘Do you fancy staying at a proper campsite tonight?’‘I don’t know. How far away is it?’‘Here, have a look at the Mapple.’ The Somen Waterfall Municipal Campsite was no more than five or six kilometres away, and because Mr Kanagawa seemed reluctant to break his routine, I offered him a deal. ‘I tell you what, I’ll buy you dinner in return. How does that sound?’‘You don’t have to. I’ve got some money.’‘I’m not trying to say that you look poor. It's just that wherever I go, people are always treating me to meals and buying me drinks, and I never get the chance to return the favour because I’m always gone the next day. You shouldn’t be staying around here, anyway,’ I indicated the well-kept greenery around the castle walls, ‘and the campsite won’t cost much.’

Mr Kanagawa agreed and we headed north, although having reached our destination, it was a toss-up as to which was the less salubrious: a shanty town for the homeless or the Somen Campsite. The site lay at the end of a narrow side road, beside which a swollen stream rushed back down the valley, and water dripped from overhanging trees as if it was still raining. The spot on which we were directed to pitch our tents was little more than a mud bank, and should there be another storm during the night – or even, God forbid, an earthquake – it looked very much as if we would be swept away downstream. Not only that, but compared to the Mapple’s price list, the rate was several hundred yen more than anticipated. As we ferried equipment up a slippery path to our pitch, Mr Kanagawa did not appear to be very pleased with the arrangement, and I noticed that his preparations for a night’s camping were a lot less methodical than my own.

‘Do you think I should put up my flysheet?’ he said, bits and pieces of luggage scattered around his feet.‘Probably, yes. Don’t you normally use it?’‘No.’‘But what if it rains?’‘Oh, I just pack up and get going.’ Mr Kanagawa unravelled the flysheet and draped it over his tent frame. ‘There, that’ll do.’‘Aren’t you going to use the pegs?’‘Nah, I can’t be bothered.’ Typical student, I thought, and tried to reason with him.‘If it’s windy, though, surely the flysheet will just blow away?’‘Maybe, but it’s too much of a pain to get them into the ground.’

Having asked at a koban for directions, we soon found ourselves on the second floor of a shopping mall, at an establishment that looked more like a bowling alley or a multiplex cinema than an onsen, with its foyer of garishly patterned carpets, high ceilings and mirrored escalators. It wasn’t until I sat down for my shower that I realised there was no soap or shampoo, and had to put my clothes back on, return to the front desk and buy two disposable grooming kits, one of which I gave to Mr Kanagawa. I got the impression that he hadn’t seen a bath for quite a while, and was more accustomed to washing under the cold tap outside deserted school changing rooms, so I didn’t want him to go without soap now that he had finally made it to an onsen.

Unaccustomed to staying up so late, Mr Kanagawa struggled to keep pedalling on the road back to the campsite, although he was still faster than me, hunched over the handlebars and with his shoulders swinging from side to side. A fog had descended on the forest, which echoed with a damp silence, and I kept losing sight of his silhouette up ahead, as it ghosted through the pale glow of each isolated streetlamp, in and out of the darkness.

Stirred as the sky began to brighten at about four thirty in the morning, I moved to close the outer door of the Snow Peak in case the sun managed to find a path through the trees and catch my eye later on. Whenever the zip for the inner door was undone, I made sure it was for as short a time, and to as narrow an opening, as possible, but only being half awake, this time I got sloppy. I left too big a gap for one too many seconds, and a mosquito took its chance to sneak in. It went to work immediately, and every few minutes as I tried to get back to sleep, that telltale, tortuous, high-pitched buzzing sound would reappear, hovering around my head. Sometimes I succeeded in swatting the mosquito away before it had the chance to bite, and sometimes I didn’t realise it had landed on my face until it was too late. I would then grab my potholer’s headlamp – a kind of hands-free torch attached to the forehead with strips of elastic – and investigate the direction in which it appeared to have escaped. But unless you are in a brilliantly lit room with a white floor, white walls and a white ceiling, mosquitoes can be maddeningly hard to find, and in the process of overturning everything that lay around me, I found the inside of the tent to be positively swarming with wildlife. While I had been expending my energy on keeping the mossies out, a veritable menagerie of caterpillars, beetles and bugs had taken up residence right under my nose, and there was no point in trying to catch them while my bloodsucking nemesis remained elusive. A few hours later I was doing my best not to scratch the cluster of red bites that now adorned my face, as I turned the tent inside out for the first time on the trip to shake it free of squatters.

Having crept past the pink-faced and still sleeping bikers, I made my way through Naruto town centre for the fifth time in the last twenty-four hours, and past a series of interchanges for the Kobé-Awaji-Naruto-Jidoshado, before a short climb cut the corner of the peninsula that reaches across towards Awajijima. The coast road north-west was reasonably flat, and with the wind behind me I felt confident of reaching Takamatsu by mid-afternoon, which should then leave enough time to catch a ferry to Shodoshima. I would have been perfectly happy with my progress, in fact, had a group of cyclists not flashed past at such high speed as to make me look as if I was standing still. Dressed in matching black outfits and blue helmets, they rode ultra-slimline racing bikes, and by the time I had thought to call out a friendly ‘Hello!’ were already several hundred metres down the road. The strongest of the five had thighs that were approximately the same circumference as my waist, and looked like some kind of cycling superhero, with broad shoulders and muscles that appeared to have been hewn from solid granite, not to mention bleached hair, a perma-tan and wraparound shades. After a turn as pacemaker, Superman peeled off the group to ride along the pavement on the opposite side of the road, sitting up in his saddle and letting go of the handlebars, despite still travelling at fifty or sixty kilometres an hour. More for my own amusement than anything else, I changed into the twenty-first of my twenty-one gears and began pedalling harder in an attempt to catch up. Having assumed the effort to be futile, I spotted the group a few minutes later, sprawled on the tarmac in a conbini car park and wolfing down a breakfast of onigiri and green tea. I asked Superman if they earned a living from cycling, or if it was just a hobby.

‘We’ve been professional since we graduated from high school,’ he explained, ‘and we race most weeks.’‘So you must be really good.’‘Well, not bad…’‘The best in Shikoku?’All five of them laughed when I said this, and were practically falling over each other to correct me.‘No, no! Nowhere near the best in Shikoku. Maybe fourth…’‘...or fifth.’‘Sixth, even.’I couldn’t work it out. I had never seen a Japanese rider in the Tour de France, and couldn’t recall seeing one in a track event either, so where were so many professionals competing?

‘We race keirin,’ said Superman, and I had to ask what he meant, as this was in the days before Sir Chris Hoy and Team GB. Keirin (競輪) is a variety of velodrome racing that originated in post-war Japan, and that despite bringing in huge betting revenues and giving out huge prize money, has remained largely indigenous. It only became an Olympic sport in 2000, which no doubt means that a lot of very talented riders have never competed outside their home country, and I wondered if Mrs M had been shielding me from this domestic variety, for fear that it might appeal too much to my passion for cycling and turn me into a compulsive gambler. Taking a closer look at their bicycles, the total weight of all five was probably less than that of the fully laden Mariposa, and I was amazed to discover that even for an on-road training session, they still had only one gear apiece.

‘How far will you be going today?’ I enquired.‘We’re going a bit further along the coast, then we’ll be heading up that mountain.’ Superman pointed to an inland peak that looked to be three or four hundred metres high, and on which a fixed-speed bike would surely be no fun at all. Despite its many faults, I realised now that the Mariposa was a marvellous machine, because if nothing else, it spared me such arthritis-inducing punishment, and having said goodbye to Sir Superman and Team Tokushima, rejoined the road in as low a gear and as leisurely a fashion as possible.

This stretch of Shikoku’s north coast appeared to have been hit hard by the recession, with many of its businesses dilapidated or abandoned, and it was some time before I found a lunch venue. I was also looking for a printer’s, as I needed to free up some space on my memory card by burning the contents onto CD, so after eating, I set about finding a USB lead that lay somewhere at the bottom of the Mariposa’s saddle-bags. Just like the Snow Peak, however, these were now home to some unwanted hitchhikers, and my reward for leaving them open overnight was exactly the kind of creepy-crawly about which I was prone to having nightmares. Curled up beneath my notebook, waterproofs and t-shirt recycling facility (ie. plastic bag full of dirty clothes) was a shiny black millipede, a good twenty centimetres long and with its rows of comb-tooth legs undulating silently from the disturbance. After removing as many items from the saddle-bag as I dared, I gingerly detached it from the Mariposa, before turning it upside down at arm’s length and shaking vigorously. The millipede plopped out onto the tarmac, but didn’t seem to appreciate the sudden exposure, and headed for the shelter of the bicycle’s back wheel. I couldn’t bring myself to prise him off, and having re-packed and re-attached my luggage, got on the Mariposa and rode away, assuming that he would be flung clear as we picked up speed. Looking back through my legs as I pedalled, though, he was still resolutely clinging on, like the last passenger on an out-of-control ferris wheel. Knowing my luck, I thought, he’ll climb onto the luggage rack at the next set of traffic lights and crawl up my sleeve – or worse still, my trouser leg – at an inopportune moment. So I dismounted, whacked the Mariposa against the kerb, poked at the millipede with a stick, and when the two were finally separated, rode away again as quickly as possible.

When you are using a foreign language, talking on the phone can be twice as hard as talking face to face, and even Mrs M and I preferred to communicate by email when we were arranging to meet up. Poor sound quality, background noise and the absence of body language can turn even the simplest of calls into a minefield of misunderstandings, so I tended to avoid answering the phone unless I could be sure of an English-speaking voice on the other end. For the most part, though, I had been keeping up with my quota of at least one Japanese conversation every day, so after three weeks of immersion, it was time to put my mobile where my mouth was, and I resolved to book my bed at Shodoshima Youth Hostel by keitai. A bit of browsing at a roadside shopping mall was enough to empty my mind of negative thoughts, and having retired to a quiet corner of the car park, I dialled the number for the hostel. For a first-time effort the call came off rather well, as the woman who answered seemed accustomed to dealing with faltering gaijin, and had such a sympathetic ear that I managed to stick to Japanese, as well as keeping her from lapsing into English, which I suspected she could speak perfectly well.She detailed the strict timetable for checking in, eating and bathing, which I confessed I would be unlikely to adhere to, as the next ferry for Shodoshima did not leave for another couple of hours. I asked for confirmation that I would be able to do my washing, which after all was the main reason I wanted to stay there, and whether the hostel was easy to spot, and in the end, the trickiest aspect of the call was not its comprehensibility but its level of politeness.

In my efforts to rebel from Ms Flower Pine’s use of the Japanese for Busy People teaching method, I had been practicing the plain form of Japanese on my conversational test subjects, and on reflection, one or two of them may have been offended by this. Theoretically speaking, a youth hostel receptionist was lower down in the social hierarchy, and ought to address me, the customer, using the polite form, while I could use the plain form in return. But on the telephone there was no way of knowing how old she was, or whether she was the owner rather than the receptionist, and should therefore be granted more respect. There are also grey areas in spoken Japanese, where it seems permissible to lapse into the plain form if a conversation’s subject matter is mundane enough, or if in some indefinable way, the participants are getting on so well that they no longer feel the need to bother with social conventions. Moreover, I often had the feeling that it was best to treat any business interaction as inherently formal, and to bestow one’s politest Japanese upon even the lowliest shop assistant. In this case, it was impossible to tell from the woman’s reaction whether or not I was striking the right note by throwing in the occasional dose of informality, so I would have to wait until I reached the hostel to find out whether or not I had passed the politeness test.

With time on my hands in Takamatsu before the ferry departed, I went to Ritsurin Park, which dates back to the seventeenth century and is one of the three most famous ornamental gardens in the country (another, Kairakuen, is in Mito, and famous for its plum blossom).

Once through the gates you can stroll around immaculate flowerbeds, over arched bridges and past carefully pruned pine trees, and because the nearby slopes of Mount Shiun are free from development, there is not the slightest hint that you are in the middle of a big city. The park is dotted with ponds, whose opaque water is as green as pea soup, and in which brightly coloured carp bob to the surface looking for food. A one-storey wooden teahouse stands at the edge of one such pond, and in the muggy weather its sliding screens had been left open to the elements, so that it almost looked as if the roof was floating in mid-air. The overall effect was impressively calming and spatially balanced, although it felt strange to be on two feet instead of two wheels, as my brain had grown accustomed to processing information at normal cycling speed, and I rather wished that Mrs M was here, as such an attractive venue was more suitable for a date than some one-man sightseeing.

Like Awajijima, Shodoshima – the kanji for which, bizarrely enough, mean ‘small bean island’ – lies in the Seto-Naikai between Shikoku and Honshu, and the ferry there takes less than an hour. The sun had already set as we docked at Uchinomi, but the youth hostel was only a kilometre or two further around the bay, and I made it just in time for dinner. A party of children had already been and gone from the cafeteria, so rather than eat alone, I asked some members of staff if they wouldn’t mind me joining them.

‘Mmm, this is delicious,’ I declared, tucking in to the various buffet dishes I had crammed onto my tray. ‘Which one of you is the chef?’A petite and pale looking girl in an apron, a young man whose long fringe obscured his eyes, and a stockier fellow in his thirties, all bowed their heads in the affirmative.‘Well done. It’s very good, you know – I should think the kids enjoyed it too.’The bow this time was less obvious, and the three of them seemed to hunch even further over their rice bowls, and to increase their chopstick speed ever so slightly.‘Have you been busy this summer?’The girl looked at her two colleagues, realised that she was now on her own, and let out a very quiet ‘Hai’ for ‘yes’.‘Good, good.’ We ate in silence for a few seconds before I tried another angle. ‘Are you volunteers, then? On holiday from university?’

This too elicited no more than a one-word reply, and it felt as if I had intruded on a gang of heavies who are in the middle of planning a bank job. It was all a far cry from Shimonoseki, where the staff had been well travelled and curious about their guests, although to be fair, my reception here was still infinitely friendlier than the one I had received at Iwakuni, and the woman at the front desk – with whom I had spoken over the phone earlier on – had apparently not been put off by my treating her as a lackey.

After dinner I asked for directions to the bathing area, which she told me was down the hall and to the left of the drinks machines, but somehow, and in a way that reminded me of the scene from This is Spinal Tap where the band get lost trying to find the stage (‘Hello Cleveland!’), I soon found myself standing outside, on a grubby window ledge next to an air conditioning unit. Surely this isn’t what she meant? I thought to myself, as I attempted to replace a mossie screen that had lurched out of its frame when I slid it open, and to climb back in without anybody suspecting that I was in the throes of some kind of prison camp escape fantasy. I could have sworn that she had said ‘to the left of’ rather than ‘turn left after’ – which, as I soon discovered, was what I should have done – but perhaps this was an example of my still remedial listening skills, rather than the skewed Japanese sense of direction.

Once undressed and sitting on my little plastic stool, I was happily showering away when I spotted yet another insect adversary. A large cockroach was perched on the wall tiles above my mirror, and although it was unlikely to bother me physically, it would certainly bother me mentally, even if it sat stock still until I had finished bathing and left the room. Over the course of nine months in Tokyo, I had knowingly shared my apartment with three different cockroaches, and found them just as difficult to kill as their reputation suggested. Your average cockroach will scuttle across the wall or the floor in a peculiarly unnerving way, and even when you have whacked him with, let’s say, a large kitchen knife, will carry on scuttling until you hit him again. Only after four or five hefty blows will he finally be in two halves, but like Monty Python’s Black Knight, the cockroach does not consider this to be a sign of defeat, and the two halves will continue to scuttle separately, albeit in a confused, twitchy and even more unnerving manner. Each half requires another three or four hits with the knife before you can feel safe enough to pick up the remains with a paper hanky, put them in a bin bag, tie it up and take it outside straight away, just in case they are re-animated at a later date.

While I continued to shower, my movements had slowed down considerably, and I couldn’t take my eyes off this one for a second. I know, I thought, I’ll drown the bastard! I’m holding a shower nozzle in my hand, so all I have to do is wash him onto the floor, force him into the bath, and he’ll be a goner in no time. At this point, I was of course choosing to overlook the fact that cockroaches are capable of surviving a nuclear attack, and therefore unlikely to be bothered by a light shower of warm water. So after frantically hosing down the walls for a couple of minutes, I realised that what the Black Knight needed was something more forceful, something with a sharp edge and a bit of weight to it. If anyone had entered the bathroom in the following few minutes, they would have been treated to the sight of a naked, soaped-up gaijin, climbing around the room like some sort of demented monkey and flailing at the walls and ceiling with a plastic washing up bowl. Surprisingly, I did manage to land a killer blow, and to continue my bath in peace, although I left it to whoever cleaned the place up to dispose of the Black Knight’s remains.

About me 私について

I suppose I must be the archetypal J-blogger - married to a native, working as an English teacher, still struggling with the language - and the main purpose of this blog is to give you an idea of what life is like for a multi-cultural couple in small-town Ibaraki.